June 3, 2010
Koury Center, Greensboro NC
The following are my notes for the lunchtime panel discussion featured during the Piedmont Triad Partnership's Capstone event concluding its 3-year federal WIRED grant.Lessons Learned: Serious Game Group and the Surgical Technology Skills Builder
• My story
• Successes
• Failures
• Lessons learned
• Focus on the real problem
I STUDIED STUDIO ART at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale and taught in California and North Carolina colleges. I had a good career with many students who are now accomplished professionals.
Things changed when I took on the job of modernizing a community college graphics program just as desktop publishing arrived — the first wave of what we today call “disruptive technology”. My faculty and I responded with new teaching methods. We partnered with progressive area businesses. My 20-year old grads moved into management positions because they were ready, with the sharpest going to RTP.
Meanwhile in the county, big printers and textile companies failed to computerize, innovate or compete. People lost jobs. I fought my administration over this new thing called the Web. Then video and multimedia went digital, and my department still couldn’t get online.
By then, I had been creating games with Adveractive in Chapel Hill. Games have the powerful ability to change the way people behave. The central idea of games is that we humans often learn most effectively in game-like situations. I left teaching in 2000 and since then I've made over 100 games for major clients like Coca-Cola, Shockwave, ESPN, and Yahoo.
Since 2004 I have been in business for myself. Most of my clients are on the West Coast. I work with area nonprofits like Reading Connections, Green Hill Center, and refugee organizations, using technology in smart ways to drive down costs and improve efficiency. I proposed the 2010 food theme for the technology and art conference sponsored by CDI, a big-tent event designed to get the most energetic Piedmont talent to connect and create.
Last year, Margaret said PTP wanted to test the region's ability to do a Really Hard Task. I was impressed that she was willing to put serious money down on the things I believed in, especially keeping smart young people here. From May 2009 until January 2010 I oversaw the team that created “Surgical Technology Skills Builder”, a serious game for Guilford Tech's surgical department.
As I see it, these are our successes:
• We built a team of game, art, and design educators who'd never worked together and made a solid product.
• Our game was good enough to turn the heads of Triangle game leaders.
• We exceeded the expectations of the game's client and subject expert, GTCC department head Tony Makin.
• We proved the collaborative model can work in the Triad, even one involving many partners — in our case, seven institutions each with its own mission statement and values.
• We showed our costs can come close to industry costs.
• Most importantly, we showed the talent’s here.
Here are our failures:
• We didn’t obligate matching or other support from academic institutions.
• We missed deadlines and failed to get student-tested feedback.
• We had uneven contributions from team members because we didn't consistently hold them accountable.
• Was our focus on creating a commercial product or teaching teachers? We failed to have a single project focus.
• And, we failed to put another project in the pipeline, dissipating momentum and dispersing the team.
What can we learn from this?
About academia...
• Let’s expect higher ed. to put some skin in the game. Two did. The rest could do more. After all, PTP paid for their faculty training.
• Let’s make sure academics can work with professionals. They must learn how to track their time or they’ll be suffocated by their other duties.
About artists...
• PTP wants to give fine artists a role in economic growth. The Piedmont has long had a “creative class” before it was called that. But to earn its place at the table, it has know how to price its time and services.
About teamwork...
• Let’s teach people how to improve their online and collaborative skills. This weakness plagues every Piedmont organization I've worked with.
About breaking silos...
• Let’s see more “Mission Impossible” projects like ours. The best way to test this region's collective abilities is to give a team of creatives and techies really difficult problems to solve. The best way to test someone’s talent is to see him work a problem.
About Piedmont leadership...
• We already have a game industry in the Triangle, so why are we talking about a game industry here? Instead, let's consider how disruptive technology could lead to the next great thing right here in the Triad. The mental attitude and skills required in the game industry represent the same savvy skills and street smarts we want to see in our classrooms, workforce and boardrooms. But I don’t hear anyone explicitly saying this. (PS. We need these skills in healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing.)
• We need articulate voices at the top who have a sophisticated understanding of how creativity and technology work on the ground level.
Focus on the real problem
The Piedmont's problems are cultural, not technological. Valuing time, working online, working outside of one’s “comfort zone”, and a tendency to resist change reflect cultural attitudes.
In planning sessions and boardrooms, everyone loves the word “transformational” to describe the scale of change needed here in the Triad. Recall this was before the housing market crashed. Our difficulties — or opportunities — already big then, are now immense.
We need to change the prevailing culture, change human behavior.
People make culture. People can change it.
